Connecting Art, Life In Downtown Manhattan

June 08, 1986|By Joseph Giovannini. New York Times News Service.

Irreverent, fun, awkward, colorful, charged with energy and purposely in dubious taste, a new style has emerged in downtown Manhattan, developed by young designers and artists over the last several years. A brash celebration of the moment, the look affects everything from interior design and furniture to clothes, hair, jewelry and even food. Apartment walls, for example, are painted in Day-Glo colors mixed with tartan patterns; at a dinner, shrimp and lobsters are arranged to look like antediluvian animals emerging from smoky dry ice.

``It`s not art over here and you over there; the idea is to make your life connected with art, from what you sit on, to what you wear, to the places you go and the things you do,`` says Richard Kaufmann, owner of Art et Industrie, a downtown gallery that specializes in art furniture.

Fed by images from magazines, television and advertisements and nurtured in downtown clubs, restaurants, stores, galleries and homes, the style has evolved spontaneously among artistic do-it-yourselfers who borrow colors, shapes and textures from everything around them--graffiti, tabloid headlines, Cyrillic signs in ethnic neighorhoods, even themselves. A rebellious improvisation recalling earlier bohemian movements, it is a sophisticated visual culture within a counterculture.

``We were walking along and saw a girl on Avenue A who had this multicolored diagonal haircut with great shape,`` says Daniel Cass, a caterer with Modern Food. ``The hair looked like a roll of Necco wafers

--remember?--and it inspired one of the desserts we do, a cookie.`` Modern Food also creates edible landscapes and cakes decorated as art forgeries.

``It has a lot to do with street culture,`` says Lisa Phillips, an associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. ``The hardware goods on Canal Street and the merchandise along 14th, for example, are affecting artists in a way refuse did the junk sculptors of the 1950s. But today there are an intentional frivolity and decadence. It`s more about the fast take than enduring values--much will fall away, and that may be the point. The work is done with a calculated offhandedness.``

A duplex apartment in the West Village that belongs to Bodi, a commercial photographer, captures the downtown spirit. Intentionally cluttered, the living room looks like rush hour in Times Square. ``I`ve just started,`` the owner says. A 12-foot-high model aluminum jet by Peter Santino decorates a wall of his two-story living room and ``Professor X,`` a red-painted devilish sculpture by Herve Di Rosa, occupies the center.

Sitting on an unstable-looking Memphis-designed couch and wearing a shirt striped vertically and a bow tie striped horizontally, Bodi says that his girlfriend forced him to buy the two relatively conventional pink leather sofas: ``They kind of look out of place.``

Downstairs in the master bedroom, a life-size sculpture of a drooling Great Dane stands opposite a small oil painting of an RCA executive as a dog, his head cocked as though listening to a gramophone.

``I don`t like `art` art,`` Bodi says. ``I shut off to its intellectuality--all those references.``

Swags of gauzy curtains are arranged over the bed, and sleek, metallic-gray entertainment pyramids by the furniture artist James Hong stand on either side.

Bodi`s apartment mixes pieces from what Kaufmann says are the two main downtown traditions. ``There`s a lot of crossover, but one half is basically East Village, informal, of-the-moment art that tells a story, and the other half is SoHo and TriBeCa--clean-lined, formal and closer to modernist traditions.``

The look originates with one-of-a-kind objects made by people trained in the arts. Unlike Memphis, the radical Italian style that has influenced downtown designers, furniture and art pieces are made largely by them for their own use and for sale as one-of-a-kind pieces, not to be put into production. Part of a way of life accessible to anyone with the eye, creativity, humor and time, the downtown look has developed outside of schools, without the leadership of one person or clique.

Dorothy Hafner, a ceramic artist whose work is sold at several uptown stores, including Tiffany & Co., says: ``I look at everything--even pink chewing gum embedded in tar. I mean, that`s hot pink squashed in black. If you can`t find beauty where you live and work, you should move somewhere else.``

In her Flatiron District apartment, Hafner uses her own colorful and irregular tableware, including a soup tureen with lightning-bolt edges.

She says young downtown artists and designers, like Pop artists of the 1960s, have looked to symbols from popular culture for their motifs. But she also traces do-it-yourself art furniture to the castoffs artists found on the street. With glued glitter and spraypaint, they transformed the pieces, many made in the 1950s. ``Furnishing their apartments this way, some of them just discovered that furniture, clothes and jewelry could be their new canvas,``